Should adultery be banned?

Also read: What's wrong in having more than one wife?

Who is this "other woman"?

And why do we continue to assassinate her as sly and sensuous. In books, films, popular culture, social consciousness? The way she and her children are openly discriminated against.

Can a man love two women, at the same time? Can a consort and a concubine bear the same affection? Is an open marriage just an upgraded, modern version of what was traditionally known as polygamy in India? Or do we deliberately reserve the stigma purely for drivers and maids - a class of people whose morality we pretend doesn't belong or affect mainstream Indian culture. The poor, naturally, the perverse...

The law of the land declares bigamy illegal. It acts against a person who has more than one wife, only if the first wife lodges a formal complaint. Even when this is done, it is not easy to establish that a second marriage has occurred at all, since the second liaison wasn’t registered in the first place. Is that the reason my aunt accepted her husband sleeping away from her, on certain days of the week? Why he made it a point to bring his second wife with him, just about everywhere he went?

Why do women like some of my friends – modern, successful, educated, evolved, in their mid 30s - willingly choose to be a second partner to a man with a ring on his finger? What is this attraction? Can she ever be forgiven and accepted? Do we ignore the innate sexism that exists in stereotyping the character of the other woman – the way we blame her. Taunt her. In the centuries-old good versus bad woman debate and the marriage versus mistress mud-slinging.

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